Shen Teng's Baghdad Eatery Will Carry China's Flag at the Oscars

The Chinese film industry has anointed its Oscars contender: "Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant," a comedy-drama set at a Chinese eatery on a Baghdad roadside, will represent mainland China in the race for Best International Film at the 99th Academy Awards.

The film's official account announced the submission on Tuesday morning, framing the movie as telling "a longing for peace, dish by dish" — a line that doubled as its marketing slogan all summer.

The film stars Shen Teng, China's most bankable comedic actor, as a cook marooned in Iraq; it is still in theaters. The premise asks Chinese viewers to negotiate an unusual identification: a Chinese restaurant keeper feeding taxi drivers, customers and armed men in a war zone, kind to everyone and aligned with none. In a year when Chinese blockbusters mostly stayed home, the setting was pointed — the industry's first leading-man vehicle set inside the Middle East's post-war order.

The Oscar bid arrives as Chinese cinema's standing abroad has thinned. The mainland has collected nominations in the category without ever winning it, and recent submissions — art-house war epics, nostalgic dramas — have rarely figured in the nominations conversation. "Dragon Restaurant" is a bid to compete on genre craft and warmth rather than prestige scale, and its backers have said as much: the announcement borrows the phrase "using the fireworks of Chinese cooking to pass along kindness."

Reactions on Weibo split in a revealing way. "The film tells you to step outside someone else's narrative and viewpoint — the Oscar is irrelevant to its greatness," one widely reposted take from August ran; another went further: "The Oscars don't deserve to award 'Dragon Restaurant.'" Both posts resurfaced with the announcement — a reminder that the film's most committed fans have adopted its in-universe ethic of not needing outside validation, even as its studio campaigns for exactly that.

The submission also caps a small fan phenomenon. Shen Teng's character's signature dish, Xufu braised rice, became a nationwide recreation contest last month, with fans — and Shen himself, posting a home version of his own — plating the carrot-and-potato rice and tagging the results; fellow actor Jia Bing submitted his own "Bing version" for Shen to grade. A film about the modest power of feeding people ended up marketed mostly by people feeding themselves.

Whether the film survives to the nominations stage will be decided early next year, when the academy's international category narrows; the ceremony itself comes in March. The film remains in theaters through the campaign — still, as its fans would have it, feeding people.